Sea Change (16 page)

Judy sits curved into her chair, leaning on one arm, sipping her black coffee. She’s never been one for breakfast. To her, breakfast is black, bitter and liquid, while all the others make fools of themselves, and she’s looking disapprovingly at Freya, stuffing her face, filling out her clothes, being on the cusp of the largeness her body might be capable of.

Guy’s missing this. He can pack so much food away he likes to leave the table aching. He loves this feeling that things are going well, that he’s had a good night’s sleep, that he’s reinvigorated and alive. This is what he’s travelling for, being the man he can never really afford to be back at home, free of routines, let off the leash with his appetite. A walk, a swim, reading a book, lying on the bed, all is permissible.

‘Thanks for doing all that driving,’ Judy says. ‘I was a total wash-out.’

‘I loved it. Didn’t we, Freya?’

The waitress fills Judy’s cup again - Judy’s her best customer.

‘You two go and see the waterfall,’ Judy says, ‘I’m not bothered.’

‘But that’s crazy,’ Guy begins, ‘it’s a couple of minutes walk from the hotel, to the top of the thing. I mean, that’s why we came here.’ He’s not even convincing himself, let alone her. It’s raining outside.

‘Really,’ she says, ‘I’m not interested.’

She drinks her coffee and gives him an amused, quick look. She’s waking up, and he suspects she’s woken up with all the answers, all the right sense of knowing what to do, and he’s just blundering his way forward, stuffing himself with cheap food, getting excited, being ridiculous. She’s just a very cool person, after all, too composed and clever for the likes of him, and she knows it.

‘Besides, I need to do some voice practice. I’ll just go to the room and do it there.’

And make some calls, he thinks, feel a bit glamorous, rather than be with this family holiday with its dumb trips to waterfalls.

‘Y’all finished?’ the elderly waitress says, her face lined and kind and made up like a young woman, her job done, another family fed and filled.

When it comes down to it, even Freya doesn’t bother to come to the waterfall. She decides to read in one of the comfy suede couches they’d seen in the reception, while Guy, committed to going outside, suspecting he too doesn’t really want to see the damn waterfall, trudges down a cement path, getting soaked within the first couple of minutes, till he reaches a small insignificant stream running through the trees. The air’s still dense with mist, and the rain is spitting out of it in fast stinging needle points, and everywhere there’s an overwhelming rushing sound of water, and he realizes it’s coming from the stream itself, as it tips casually over the wide lip of a flat rock, beginning its explosive transformation into the highest waterfall this side of the Mississippi. A small brown stream, suddenly so white, full of action and noise, crashing on the rocks as it falls, rising in veils of steam and mist, and the others, they’re all missing it. Freya’s on the comfy sofa with a magazine open on her lap, and Judy’s upstairs making phone calls. They might as well be a thousand miles away - while he’s out here on a slippery path of rocks, getting soaked, and he climbs down while the forest rises around on the steep cliffs like something magical and primeval, covered in vines and smelling so fresh and earthy, and it’s so overwhelmingly
wet
, so overwhelmingly
alive
, all these black bears out here, somewhere, driven mad by the sound of water constantly rushing through the hills, watching him now from behind the trunks, and he feels very little, very little indeed.

Position: Anchorage in Deben estuary. About midnight.

After all that writing, Guy still can’t sleep. Instead he sits in the wheelhouse, with the lights off, looking out across the estuary. Although it’s late, a curious glow seems to be shining off the water, as if it’s made of a strangely metalled substance.

He sees something move on the
Falls of Lora
, and realizes someone is standing on deck. It’s Rhona, standing alone, and even at this distance he can see she’s very drunk. She’s guiding herself across the top of the cabin, reaching for the cables and ties like she’s climbing through some impenetrable thicket. Half-turning, swinging her way forward, hampered by the blanket she’s wrapped herself up in and a bottle in one hand, until she’s standing at the bow. Guy smiles. She’s a troubled one, he thinks. All that beauty and dangerous glances, and still she’s drinking herself through the nights.

He observes her, making out her slender figure beneath the blanket, as she takes a long emptying drink from the bottle. She looks down into the water and reaches for a cable behind her and as the boat tips gently with her weight he sees her drop the bottle off the side. It disappears without a splash, and as he watches her, standing so ghostly still above it, she seems to shrink, sliding strangely through her own blanket and suddenly vanishing too, into the water.

Guy can’t believe what he’s just seen, can’t believe what is happening, it’s too surreal, and even while he’s flinging open the door of the wheelhouse he’s already anticipating the mad leap he will make off the side of his boat, already experiencing that strange feeling of weightlessness followed by the sudden overwhelming flood of cold black water.

He runs the length of the boat and throws himself, barefoot, into the estuary. When he hits the water he is plunged below it and he feels one foot go into the soft silky mud before he surfaces, disorientated, smelling the salt and the mud and seeing the
Falls of Lora
from a different angle, further away than it had appeared in the wheelhouse. He feels the drag of his clothes as he swims as fast as he can, splashing too much and trying to call out and it seems to take an age for him to reach the other boat and he still hasn’t seen Rhona.

He dives, and surfaces, and dives again and briefly, he feels something that isn’t water. A dress, a part of a dress, he tugs it and reaches further and grabs something else, an arm or leg and he pulls her towards him - both of them breaking the surface now and she coughs loudly in his face and half chokes and she clings to his shoulder as he tries to bring her along the side of the yacht.

As they reach the stern he realizes he’s able to stand on the riverbed, on some bank of stones down there, and as he looks up he sees Marta above him, drenched to the waist where she’s been groping for them in the darkness. She’s shouting and crying and trying to reach out to Rhona where, together, they can haul her up on to the step near the transom.

When at last they have her safe on the boat, Rhona starts to giggle and cough some more and she tries to push them both away. It’s the first time she’s spoken. ‘I fell,’ she says, ‘I just fell off this stupid boat.’

And Marta laughs quickly, nervously, brushing her daughter’s hair to one side and asking, ‘Did you? Did you fall?’ over and over again and she looks at Guy, searchingly, and in the look she gives him she is full of questions.

‘She fell,’ he manages to say. ‘I was sitting in the wheelhouse - I saw her. I think she slipped.’

And Marta nods, wanting to believe it, totally, and wanting to show how much she has to thank Guy for.

Position: Same, anchorage in Deben estuary. 9:30am

He wakes in the morning, suddenly, filled with the images of last night. How he’d jumped into the estuary, the dreamlike motion of his swimming stroke that didn’t seem to bring him closer to their boat, the feel of Rhona’s dress, underwater, and the softness of her leg when he managed to touch her. How, before she went in, she had stood at the bow, so much like a ghost, staring down into the water.

She had fallen. She had slipped. Had she? He can’t be sure. Marta said she must have slipped. It has to be that way, it’s something they need to believe. But he remembers the look that Marta gave him. The look was unequivocal. Regardless of what had actually happened: he had saved her.

He tries to sleep more, but it’s no use. He’s too full of a sense of worry, of a deep-rooted problem without shape or answer. It’s risen during the night like a tide.

When he goes to the saloon he sees his work area - his desk covered in maps and city guides of America - of street plans pinned above it and, seeing it now in the same way as Marta and Rhona must have done when they came to visit, he sees the library madness of an obsessed man. On notepaper he writes various words, hoping to see some hidden clue where this new anxiety is coming from. He writes ‘Judy’, ‘Freya’, ‘the
Flood
’. Familiar words with familiar shapes so overlaid with meaning they appear, in this instant, impenetrable. The J of Judy, still an optimistic letter to him, despite all that’s passed. The y of Freya, still looping at speed below the line, still giddy - Freya’s y, the one she could write haltingly, had always been capitalized, two strikes of the pen - she’d never joined her letters up. He tries some other words: ‘estuary’, a mystery to him really, neither a likeable nor unlikeable word, curiously lacking flow. Then he tries something: ‘Marta’ and ‘Rhona’. It feels strange. Marta’s name is oddly comforting, he likes it, whereas Rhona’s name seems full of unease. And then a final word, written small on the corner of the pad, but full of questions for him: ‘Nashville’.

His diary is beginning to consume him, he knows that. It’s an addiction, a hit he needs every day, but it makes him feel balanced - it makes him feel emancipated. For a time. And this morning, more than most, he needs it.

He reads the relevant pages of a city guide to Nashville, looks at a street plan, studying the grey intersections of roads and buildings, searching for his place.

Guy finds himself sitting in an easy chair surrounded by several other easy chairs, all of them empty. The one he’s chosen is fabric, cream, and has a swing to it as well as a tilt which he’s not keen on. Not a thing out of place in here, he thinks, looking around. A low glass table with music magazines on it in a fanned-out design, a drinks bar in the corner, all of the bottles arranged in height order, a wall covered with pressed records, gold and platinum, in silver aluminium frames. Could be anywhere in the world, he thinks, it has the air of international well-oiled business, except there are also a row of hand-signed Stetsons on the wall, and a couple of guitars with plaques below them, one, a beautiful Gibson Dove, with the famous white bird inlaid across a deep red pick guard. Nashville, finally, this is like no other place in the world.

He’s been sitting in this room for about an hour. He has a book to read, he has a drink to drink, but still the time is passing slowly. Freya’s been smart, he thinks, she’s gone with one of the PAs for a bit of sightseeing and shopping, is probably right now looking at CD racks as her mother likes to do. But not Guy. He decided to stick it out at the studio, claiming tiredness, but really it’s to do with not wanting to miss anything. If there
is
anything, then he won’t be missing it.

As a result, he’s in this glorified waiting lounge, thick with comfort, feeling uncomfortable, left alone. Through an open doorway he can see a wide corridor leading to other parts of the complex. Studio A and Studio B, written above a drawing of a hand pointing that way. Occasionally a man walks by the door - he’s tall with dark hair, dressed in pale jeans and a flowery shirt. He wears cowboy boots, and the boots look out of place on the thick pile carpet. He thinks the man’s name is Bradley, but he can’t remember. He was introduced, and immediately forgot.

Guy goes to the bar and pours another drink, downs half of it, then walks through to the control room for Studio C. A very fat man is sitting by the panel - both he and his mixing desk look way too big for the room. The man Bradley is in there too, his feet up on a low table, eating some sort of roll. He nods and smiles at Guy, and carries on eating. Guy finds his own stool near the back of the room, away from the desk and its smell of warm electricity.

Through the glass he sees Judy, his Judy, standing off-centre in the live room. Wires lead to her, to her mic and to her headphones, and briefly Guy thinks he’s about to witness some kind of operation, that she’s being plugged in and kept alive in that little sterile cell so they can extract her life. It’s not so far from the truth. She has her hair tied back and is sipping a hot black coffee. A small twist to her back, he sees her slender arm and the lightness of touch with which she holds the microphone stand. There’s a man in there too, with silver hair tied back in a ponytail, talking her through something - but it’s entirely silent through the glass. Judy’s nodding and doing that shy smile from the side of her mouth which is giving the man a sense of assurance. Seeing that smile, Guy feels a little star-struck by her, more so because she’s so clearly at ease. His wife, under such scrutiny and glare and she’s entirely relaxed - she gets much more wound up by the smallest things Guy does or doesn’t do. It doesn’t seem fair.

Bradley says a soft
heh
to the engineer at the mixing desk - who turns, stiffly, and smiles at Guy. ‘Right, mister, she’s doing real good,’ he says, kindly and automatically, his mouth drawn wide. He’s sweating, and has a handkerchief in his hand which he keeps dabbing at his temple. It’s not that hot in there.

For Guy’s sake the engineer brings up a slide and Judy’s voice springs into the room on four speakers. ‘. . . Feel it lower on the first then wait for the cue, yes?’ she says, her words given unnatural volume and intimacy, like a hot bedtime whisper, so loud in your ear, but said from another room. Her voice seems owned by someone else, added to, enriched, taken apart by this massive calm machine into its mysterous threads before being wound back together. This machine full of wire might break the code that makes her voice so special, present the series of lights and levels which gives away its secret. Guy would love to find out just what that is. Even after all these years, he’d like to sit at the desk and remove parts of her sound, bit by bit, until he discovered the qualities that affect him most.

That’s when he sees Phil, sitting the wrong way round on a chair at the back of the live room, his guitar by his feet. He’s resting his chin on his arms and is grinning wolfishly at Judy, listening to the silver-haired man and smiling like an imbecile. Phil, whom Guy’s known since he joined the band, since the time he was a market town music shop assistant, and a prat. He used to sit at the back of that shop playing the guitar, bending the notes, sweep picking the chords into arpeggios to show off. Fond of a loud shirt and a waistcoat, too. For ten years he’s been gazing at Judy, laughing slyly and cracking jokes and being in love with her. Dickweed, Guy mouths to himself, enjoying the childish satisfaction it gives.